grenades - weapons

The First Foot Guards

We are a Revolutionary War reenactment group based in Boston MA,
accurately portraying the royal household regiment that is now known as
The Grenadier Guards

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Grenades

The flaming bomb was the badge of the Grenadier Company of the regiment during the RevWar. It now is the symbol of the regiment which is nowadays referred to as The Grenadier Guards.

You can see that the grenade was a spherical bomb. It was hollow cast iron, and looked like a small cannonball. It was filled with gunpowder and small balls. There was a round hole in part of the surface through which it had been filled and into which the fuse fitted.

The fuse was merely a length of slow match, cut to size, and it passed through a wooden plug that was rammed home into the round hole in the casing. It was a simple matter to light the fuse using the slow match stored in the brass match case. It took a strong (and courageous) man to hurl them. It took someone with intelligence to cut the fuse to the right length. A miscalculation could result in death of the grenadier.

By the time of the RevWar, grenades had been discontinued as being ineffective, but the Grenadiers remained as 'shock troops'. Since they were an elite, they retained their cap badges, their match cases and their hangers.

In the Grenadier uniform above, you can see cap badge, the brass match case on the crossbelt, and the sword (referred to as a hanger).